The earliest advocates of English overseas expansion in the age of Elizabeth I were to produce, during the 1570s, various types of propositions recommending voyages to the west, to the South Sea and beyond to the East Indies. One of the most widely known and influential was Humphrey Gilbert's Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia, composed in 1566 and published a decade later. Although it contained a world map portraying the Straits of Magellan and Peru, its main objective was to prove the existence of a North-West Passage leading by a short voyage to the East Indies, and to advocate the supposed commercial advantages of this route, a dream tenaciously pursued by generations of English navigators since the voyages of John Cabot. But before Gilbert's Discourse had come into print, in 1570 the Spanish ambassador in London reported that a Portuguese seaman, Bartolomeu Bayão, had presented to the Privy Council a project ‘to occupy and colonise one or two ports in the Kingdom of Magallanes, in order to have in their hands the commerce of the Southern Sea . . . as well as getting as near as they wish to Peru’.

In 1574 this was taken a stage further, again in formulation if not yet in practice, by the proposal presented to Elizabeth by Richard Grenville, for the ‘discovery, traffic and enjoying’ of lands south of the equator not at that time in the possession of any Christian sovereign. It identified the regions and the potential rewards that would remain a lure to Englishmen for centuries, albeit more fitfully sought than others in North America and, as we have seen, often imagined in terms of an extraordinary reality. Grenville envisaged exploratory work which it was anticipated might culminate in trade and coastal settlements between the River Plate and southern Chile, perhaps the province of Arauco, an area also favourably alluded to later in texts compiled by Hakluyt. The scheme furthermore held out ‘the likelihood of bringing in great treasure of gold, silver and pearl into this realm from those countries’, that is Peru.